Does Your First Chapter Contain These 5 Reader-Hooking Elements?
Romance readers have so many books on their TBR and stored on their e-readers, they hardly get to half of them. They will choose a book, start the first chapter, and quickly judge whether or not to continue reading. From the moment their eyes land on your opening page, it’s essential to keep them hooked.
Will they x-out of your book immediately, or will they be glued to the story?
As an editor, I want to help you keep readers so intrigued, they just can’t x-out!
Does your opening chapter have these 5 key elements?
The reader can visualize your main character.
Readers want to know what this person looks like: hair color, height, age, etc. You shouldn’t go into extreme detail right away—don’t info dump, because that’s a whole different problem. But the reader’s imagination wants to imagine something, and they need to be told what the protagonist looks like in general terms.
Besides, the way someone looks tells us a lot about their character. Use physical description as an opportunity to show rather than tell.
For instance, your male lead is a Type A, high-powered mafia boss. Instead of telling us that, you could have him show up in designer shades and a perfectly pressed shirt, looking like he stepped off the pages of a glossy magazine.
The reader knows exactly where the characters are.
In other words, what is the setting? Make sure you address these two things:
Time: Is this story taking place on another planet in the year 3045? In modern day where everyone’s using smartphones? In a medieval fantasy world? Or maybe on an alternate Earth that is mostly contemporary with some magical elements. There is a way of showing this (without exposition!) so the reader knows how to visualize the setting.
Location: Similarly, the reader has to be able to visualize where exactly these people are standing talking. In someone’s bedroom? In a school classroom? In a coffee shop? The sights, sounds, and smells of the place will give readers a clue and help them picture a setting for the characters.
If readers don’t know where the characters are, they will be confused and frustrated.
The reader can tell what your character’s “problem” is.
By problem, I mean the internal wound that is going to make things hard for the character. And readers love that! It’s like catnip to them. In romance, it’s called the internal wound; in a hero’s journey, it’s called the tragic flaw; sometimes it’s called the internal conflict. It’s all the same!
From the first set of dialogue or the character’s first inner thoughts, it should be clear what their damage is.
The reader isn’t confused by too many side characters.
I cannot tell you how many times I have started stories that opened with too many characters. The author does this when they want to introduce a group of friends, but it tends to become confusing. Even if the chapter is titled with the protagonist’s name, that is not enough.
I have personally given up reading stories that threw characters at me because I was so confused about what was going on, who was who, and how everyone related to one another. It was too much work to figure that out in the first scene.
The reader can tell that your protagonist’s life is about to be rocked.
By the end of chapter one, readers should have:
a) an idea of what “normal life” is for your character, and
b) how that is going to be different from now on.
That means something big has to happen in chapter one that changes this person’s life in an irreversible way. In a romance novel, this is usually some combination of the meet-cute and the inciting incident. Your hero has to meet their future love interest, and something has to happen that will mean there will be conflict between them.
The reader should end the chapter knowing: life for this person is never going to be the same. And they need to find out what that looks like!
If you are struggling with these 5 elements, you would benefit from a developmental editor. Don’t let people x-out of your book and move onto the next romance novel on their list. Keep them reading by hitting all these things in chapter one.